A Class Struggle

Special Report: Mainstreaming Students

City Inclusion Effort Brings Serious Problems

February 05, 2006|By RACHEL GOTTLIEB; Courant Staff Writer

Some nights, 8-year-old Brian Miranda has nightmares and wakes up almost hourly. In the morning, everything is a fight: climbing out of bed, getting dressed, sitting down to breakfast and walking out the door to school.

Last year, when Brian was in a class of nine students and had what his mother describes as a patient special education teacher, Brian liked school. But this year, as part of a sweeping effort to end the segregation of special education students in Hartford, Brian has been placed in a mainstream class of 23 students at Batchelder Elementary School.

And he hates it.

``I am very angry with the school,'' said Margerie Miranda, Brian's mother. ``They are not helping me.''

To comply with a landmark court case on educating children with learning disabilities or emotional problems, the Hartford public school system in September transferred 1,300 special education students from segregated programs to neighborhood schools.

The massive movement convulsed the entire school system -- which was, to some degree, expected. But six months later, teachers, parents and experts say, the system is still in crisis: Special education students are not getting the services they need, regular classrooms are being disrupted and teachers are exasperated.

In a series of letters, lawyers who advocate for children have outlined the system's failure to train teachers or comply with students' individual education plans. Teachers and parents arepleading for help. Children are refusing to go to school. The state Department of Education has ordered the district to pay for an outside audit.

``We're supportive of students learning in the least restrictive environment,'' said George Dowaliby, chief of the state Department of Education's Bureau of Special Education. ``We're not supportive of that being done haphazardly.''

Superintendent of Schools Robert Henry concedes that the program needs correcting, but he says the challenges were expected considering the scope of the initiative. Henry said he thought about going slower, but realized the changes were going to require extensive training and adjusting regardless of the pace.

Because the federal No Child Left Behind law requires all students to take the same tests, Henry said it only makes sense for the children to be exposed to the curriculum that will be tested. That's the curriculum in the regular education classrooms.

``Are we where we want to be?'' Henry asked rhetorically. ``Obviously not. But we're making progress. We're fixing decades long issues in one year, one school at a time.

``This is part of correcting the ills of the past,'' Henry said. ``We have a number of places where it is working. The initiative is proceeding as smoothly as can be expected.''

Lost And Intimidated

Not smooth enough for many. Critics of the program tick off a series of complaints:

* Some blended classes are too large for teachers to handle.

* Special education students are feeling lost and intimidated.

* Regular education students are getting distracted.

* Autistic youngsters are having some of the hardest times blending in, teachers say, particularly in the middle schools where they feel scared.

In a recent letter to Henry, Martha Stone, executive director of the Center for Children's Advocacy at the University of Connecticut School of Law, asserted that the failure of the district to give students proper support is actually harming some children.

One student represented by the law center was so desperate he asked his classmate to kill him, Stone wrote. Last year, the letter says, the boy made gains in schools. But this year he regressed.

Two of the law center's other clients, who attend Fox Middle School, are refusing to go to school. One is embarrassed by his inability to perform on the same level as his peers in the classroom of mixed abilities; the other is upset over ``the change in her environment.''

At least one school - Quirk Middle School - had so much trouble mainstreaming two dozen students with emotional disturbances and disruptive behavior that it bucked the district's policy of full inclusion and confined the students to ``transitional'' self-contained classrooms.

Jay Nieves, 14, was among those. He had so much trouble with all the transitions - and with the loss of a mentor teacher who was transferred to a different school several months into the school year - that he stopped going to school three months ago.

The class that was created for Jay and some of his peers was made up largely of students transferred from a special school for emotionally disturbed children, the Hartford Transitional Learning Academy. The academy students were transferred to Quirk as part of the mainstreaming initiative, though Jay did not attend the academy.

The new class at Quirk was chaotic, Jay said, and too distracting for him to concentrate.